Best editing software?

Adjusting things like perspective, collinearity and cropping have always been better in Zoner than Adobe products although they (Adobe) might have caught up in the latest versions.

There is a magazine with some good tips....
http://magazine.zonerama.com/category/zoner-photo-studio-tips/

Photo Ninja's also very good but needs a powerful PC....

REVIEW

Paint Shop Pro Ultimate looks good value especially as it contains Perfectly Clear by Athentech Imaging which normally costs $199 dollars (often sold cheaper as part of bundled offers and also free with some cameras) It's very good for quick fixing photos.

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I use Sagelight image editor link for RAW conversion work and initial tonal balancing, contrast, shadow and highlight work & vibrancy. For this I find it excellent. It is not an image managment programme, so for this I use iMatch, link, a very powerful cataloguing and image organising programme.

After Sagelight I open my 16 bit TIFF conversions into the free Photoshop CS2, which has all the PS basics that work just like the later versions - it lacks a few newer refinements of course, but it is free! This I use for any colour balancing, Noise reduction with the Topaz DeNoise plugin applied onto a duplicate layer (then the bits you don't need masked out), and if needed the same layer approach to sharpening (smart sharpen filter is good). Any final saturation adjustments are also very good with Photoshop on an adjustment layer. Then I use PS CS2 to crop and resize the outputs to JPEGs for their intended use.

Most distortion correction I find I can do in the PS Distortion filter, but if there's anything more complex then I use Helicon Filter .

Greg, there is a good free plug in which will work with Sagelight -Perspective Transformations, I use this now rather than HF, so you may want to take a look.
http://www.vicanek.de/plugins/perspective.htm
Stephen

Thanks Stephen, that would be a great addition - I'll check it out, much appreciated!

LR - never, hate it
PS6 - 1%, only if doing some heavy editing
Silkypix Studio Pro 6 - the rest of the time
DxO Optics Pro 8 - a dodgy copy which gets used once in a blue moon
FastStone - viewing and quick crops and edits of JPEGs

It is Elements 8 that I use for 1% (or less of the time). From time to time, there are things that I do struggle with, which Photoshop CC would do better in particular ........

* Most of the editing tools in Elements operate only on 8 bit files
* Layers in Elements only operate on 8 bit files (without a backdoor fiddle)
* You need a (free) plugin, Grant's tools or equiv to create and use layer masks
* Complex selections (e.g. ladies hair) are much harder because the Refine Edge dialogue is crippled in Elements 8 (better in Elements 11 onwards, I understand)
* Elements has limited image merging functions. Stuff like HDR, focus stacking and generating panoramas can be pain in the proverbials - Photoshop can do a lot more. There are plugins for Lightroom (LR/Enfuse) that can do focus stacking and HDR - though maybe not so well as Photoshop. You can use an external programme Microsoft ICE for stitching images for panoramas and it works well.

If you are the kind of photographer who strives to get it right in-camera and doesn't want to spend time making silk purses out of sow's ears using Photoshop, then all you'll ever need is Lightroom. On the other hand, if you are into creating complex composite images from several source photos then you need Photoshop.

Andrew

In order to help you straighten and crop easily in photoshop elements which I noticed you have, take a look at this tutorial it seems the perfect solution for you (and me as I use PSE 11, upgraded from pse 8 ) link
I've always struggled with the organiser in pse 11, where it's awkward to zoom in to 100% and then return back to the same image in organiser, so often use picasa as the organiser and pse 11 as the editor, they work reasonably well together. However I found picasa can be a real pain with it's updates and corruption of databases etc so I refuse to rely on it and won't add any info to it because I've lost it too often.
As you can see a lot of people recommend LR, but invariably they always mention they also have an editor program because LR won't do it on it's own (even if it is very rare they use the editor). That always puts me off as I would like one program that does it all and not have to relearn how to use the editor every time I need it because it's been so long..... but LR keeps getting a good mention everywhere... maybe one day I'll add it...

Is this the cost of a normal licence? I can only find this price for the student or upgrade version and as I'm neither a student or a upgrader..... Otherwise it's around £100 for me.

Ok, I've just read this thread with interest. For me I think the first question you need to ask when purchasing editing software is how far do I want to take editing my images ? I consider the Adobe products to be the only ones that should be considered. If only for the tremendous knowledge/learning forum that is youtube, If editing, improving your images is your desire. Then I feel Lightroom is the cheapest and best way to go. But If your desire is to further manipulate, cut out, composite your images then you must go the Photoshop route. Photoshop is the without doubt the No1 programme on the market today. Drawback its the most expensive. It performs all the tasks that Lightroom does, With its Camera Raw and Bridge included options. Maybe not so well at cataloguing.

I use LR for 99% of the time the other 1% I use PS Elements just for complex cloning and stitching panoramas.

I am like a lot of others here and use Lightroom 99%

Hi I use Lightroom 100% 0f the time. I find it much easier than lightroom and it does all I need.
Derek

Hi I never use anything but Lightroom i find it easier to use than photoshop.

I'm a late adopter of Lightroom, having used Photoshop since 1992.
For Processing (not editing) a large number of images LR is in another league - much much faster.
I'm still getting my head around the cataloging, still mislaying stuff or finding myself working inside an odd collection, but that's just me being a bit thick
PS is still king for proper edits or single images, but now the TIFF comes out of LR and goes back in afterwards.
I love some of the latest developments in PS like the crop tool and content fill/move etc. Straightening images without cropping out the dead triangles around the edge is now a breeze. I haven't found a way to do that in LR (??)

Lens Corrections - > Manual -> Transform